


All is Right Once More

by AnontheNullifier



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Infinity War, Requested fic, Vision comes back as himself, fluff towards the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 19:20:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14921363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnontheNullifier/pseuds/AnontheNullifier
Summary: After the defeat of Thanos, Tony and Shuri enlist Wanda's help in bringing Vision back to life.





	All is Right Once More

**Author's Note:**

> Written based on a request from Tumblr: Can you write something post iw? They won, everyone is back except vision and Wanda isn't doing great (nightmares and grief) so tony and Shuri decide to bring him back somehow and yeah, happy ending, pretty please?
> 
> I believe this fulfills your ask and it, unsurprisingly, turned out way longer than planned. Sorry. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoy!

Wanda swore to the Avengers she would never touch their minds again, without permission anyway, and she has held to that promise as best she can, but sometimes their thoughts are too loud. Which is one of the numerous downfalls to having telepathic powers--incidentally picking up on thoughts and emotions, typically ones that are either particularly strong or directed towards her (sometimes both). If only her teammates understood how easily their misguided concern and silent judgment of her behavior morphed into an invasive species, overtaking her own mind, and crowding out all other avenues of escape. Currently every single mind in the compound is focused on her and it is overwhelming, her fingers cramping as she grips the pillow, folding the soft object around her head to muffle the sound of their cognitions.

The nexus of their concern is easily discernible, she had another nightmare, the same one as the night before, and the one before that, and really it has been recurring since she came back, since her body was forced from the welcome relief of death and thrust back into the bleakness of living. How can they expect her to be grateful, to accept this, to not scream at night at the memories of Vision’s face, at his gentle reassurances, at the feel of decimating the love of her life, and then at watching him be brought back and killed? The residue of his existence is stitched into her palms, itching incessantly, flaring up at every memory, every memento, every whispered mention of him. It has been so bad Wanda can’t even sleep in her room, his smell somehow clinging to every surface, her eyes always drawn to the walls, anticipation building at his head popping through, his face concerned and embarrassed when she reminds him to knock. But he won’t be coming through the wall, the soft lilt of his voice as he says her name forever silenced, his  _I love you_  haunting her because she was never able to return it.  

The ripples of her teammates’ conversations lap in and out of her awareness  _We need to talk to her_ ,  _She needs help_ ,  _What if she breaks?_  They are clearly concerned, perhaps they should be. Stark once called her a weapon, a source of terrifying power and destruction, one strong enough to hold off Thanos and destroy an infinity stone simultaneously. Everyone in the movies knows how dangerous it is to cross wires, make a wrong move while in the presence of a ticking bomb, and she can feel the power stirring in her, the barely contained fury writhing just under her skin.  They are worried if they say something wrong, if they aren’t gentle enough she might explode.  _I think we need to tell her about him._  Wanda freezes at the thought, eyes shuttering as she concentrates on the source, pinpointing the hesitant suggestion to one of the labs. An equally tentative response reaches her,  _Yeah but what if it doesn’t work?_

Wanda sits up in her borrowed bed, her scarlet tinged hands brushing the sweat-dampened strands from her face. Slowly she places her feet on the ground, mind honed in to the lab, desperately seeking any other information without prying and breaking her promise. When nothing transmits beyond a slight flutter of what might be hope or could be terror, she stands, arms crossing over her chest as she grips herself, her feet carrying her along the hallways until she reaches the dimly lit research quarter of the compound. There is one light on, the same one that has been on since they all returned after Thanos was thoroughly destroyed. Wanda swallows down her panic, cinches her arms tighter to tamper the tremble forming in her body as she inches forward, mind preparing to see the gray, lifeless color of Vision’s skin, his body kept in a temperature controlled cradle, the team never reaching a decision on what, precisely, to do with his corpse. After at least a dozen failed simulations of how to bring him back, Wanda offered the suggestion of a proper burial, desiring and needing closure, yet there was strong pushback from the sciency types, reassurance that they shouldn’t be too hasty, just in case.

“What are you doing?” Wanda’s hands lift, scarlet erupting around her knuckles as she takes in Tony and Shuri standing near Vision.

Stark turns towards her first, his mouth morphing into a cocky grin, one that is expected but hollow, the dark bags under his eyes betraying his own lack of sleep, though his is a combination of nightmares, guilt, and the newborn baby that refuses to sleep. Wanda still isn’t sure why fate allowed Stark to procreate, but that is beyond the scope of her current situation. “Wanda, fancy seeing you here.”

She raises her hands a bit higher, spreading them out as the power grows between them. “What are you doing?”

“We,” Shuri nods towards Tony, a quick reassuring smile flashing across her face, begging Wanda to lower her hands, “think we figured out how to bring Vision back.”

The information shouldn’t be a surprise, it has been their goal, an impossible task the team clings to as a means of rectifying the losses they all accrued, yet it still shocks her, the admission freezes her blood, turns her stomach over, hope a nauseating enemy after all they’ve been through. “Will you ever let me just move on?”

Her words seem to impact Tony the most, his facade of fashionable indifference tumbling into a deep, sorrowful frown, his hands wringing anxiously as he stares directly at the scarlet still protruding from Wanda’s hands. “If we fail this time, then you can bury him.” His tone is laced with grave sincerity one that continues to permeate the silence as they wait for her to either acquiesce or deny their request.

Wanda pushes between them, stopping once her toes meet the resistance of the cradle and her hand can descend onto the clear glass, a harsh mimicry of the first time she was in Vision’s presence, when his mind and body were brimming with life and possibilities, while now there is nothing to sense with her powers no matter how hard she tries to reach him. “How?”

“I’ve been analyzing the neurological data from,” Shuri pauses, the same pause all of them (except for Drax, before the Guardians left) use when referring to the pre-snap time, “Wakanda. I believe there is enough there to help me map the majority of his neural networks and Helen has offered to reconstruct both his frontal lobe and forehead.”

“Plus we have the Mindstone,” Tony adds the information though it is unnecessary given it rests in a guarded and locked safe in the compound.

Shuri steps up next to Wanda, studying Vision’s still face before placing her hand on Wanda’s shoulder, “I’ll need you too.”

This tactic is new, the plans for the reconstruction of Vision long germinating, but never before did they approach her or imply that she might be useful in bringing him back. “I don’t know anything about this stuff.”

“Nope,” the woman smiles and it’s surprisingly playful, gentle yet also resolute, a victory forming in her eyes, telling Wanda that there is an endgame and Shuri knows exactly what it is. “But you know his mind better than anyone, you can help us fill in any gaps.”

For a brief, fleeting millisecond, Wanda allows some hope to blossom in her chest, and it is just long enough to utter an, “Okay.”

 

 

It’s been ten days, each one Wanda has spent sitting in a chair against the wall of the lab, the balls of her feet flat on the seat while her arms clutch her knees. Her eyes rarely leave the table where they’ve laid Vision’s body, the discoloration of his skin causing him to blend in with the metal slab, but with each passing session the concave profile of his forehead is built up, a process punctuated by sparks from the soldering of the synthetic axons and the inevitable cussing, both in English and Wakandan, as Shuri shoos Tony away every time something seemingly goes wrong. It’s when Helen joins them, squeezing Wanda in a heartfelt hug upon entering the lab, that a jitteriness develops in Wanda’s limbs, one that makes her incapable of continuing her silent vigil against the wall. She observes with interest as Helen passes the newly improved portable cradle back and forth over Vision’s forehead, his skin reforming into a patch of crimson, one that looks so out of place against the rest of his body that it pricks at Wanda’s eyes, the normalcy of seeing his true skintone almost too much to handle.

Once the synthesizing stops and the Mindstone is returned to him, Wanda finds her arm moving on its own, her hand running along the new patch of skin, savoring the unique, familiar texture against her fingertips. “Wanda,” her name is whispered, as if anything louder would somehow trigger a switch and eradicate the world. “It’s your turn.”

Unlike the rest of the process, there is no well-defined protocol or order of operations for Wanda’s portion, just a hypothesis that Wanda will know what she’s looking for once she is inside his brain. Wanda nods while removing her hand from his skin, leaving it to hover just over the Mindstone. Scarlet cascades from her fingers, pouring into his forehead as her eyes close and her head tilts to the side. “There’s,” she searches deeper, eyelids tightening as desperation builds in her chest, her lungs beginning to spasm at the sheer emptiness of his mind. Aggravation and anger replaces the desperation, her fingers clamping shut as she turns her ire towards the others in the room, “there’s nothing there.”

“I- um,” Tony’s confidence wavers, choosing a fine time to be flummoxed and stuttering for the first time in his existence, “I- Shuri?”

The young royal’s response is far more measured, an impressive stillness of her aura as she concentrates on solving the problem. “When you touched his mind in the cradle,” a story she kindly asked Wanda to tell her multiple times in great detail, “there was an outside power source, correct?”

“Yes, he was in the cradle.”

Shuri grins, a snap of her fingers kickstarting her body as she hooks the cradle back up to the lab generator (they had removed it so they could channel the electricity to their other tools).  “We can’t expect the same results without replicating the original experiment.” The woman stares at them expectedly, eyes wide and a grin on her face as she waits for them. “We need to put him,” Shuri gesticulates while she talks, an interpretive dance informing them of what she’s asking them to do, “back in there.”

Together they move Vision from the table into the cradle, Wanda’s powers would be more than enough to complete the task but she allows the others to feel like they are helping. Her heart almost stops beating when they close the door, the shroud of glass closing him in his casket once more. Shuri walks around the cradle, flipping switches and pushing buttons, and then there is a beep, followed by another and then another and for the first time since Wanda returned from being dust, there is actual data streaming from Vision’s body instead of the grim, dark screen of an inactive monitor. “Try now.”

Wanda inhales as she approaches the cradle, elbows bent and hands placed on the glass. The first time she felt this there was a sense of wonderment, a surreal awe at being the first to touch a mind, now there is a similar flutter in her chest though not one due to connecting with a brand new consciousness, but with feeling him again, the soothing, golden, gorgeous waves of Vision. “I can feel him.”

“Okay,” the word vibrates with enthusiasm as Shuri activates the kimoyo bead at her wrist, pulling up a hologram of Vision’s mind, “tell me if anything feels off.”

A first scan reveals nothing alarming, but Wanda isn’t willing to reach conclusions based on one sweep and so she explores his mind, each time going just a bit deeper. “Here,” on the hologram there is a blotch of red where Wanda is concentrating her powers, “it needs to go to the left.”

“Got it,” Shuri inserts her finger into the image, pinching and then expanding her fingers to zoom in until she sees what Wanda has found, and then she inches the neuron just a bit to the left and Wanda nods.

“That’s better.”  Twenty three more sweeps reveal only three other areas of concern, though the last is more than simply an askew neuron. “There’s,” Wanda inserts her powers deeper, head cocking right and then left as she searches the area,”there’s a whole section that’s,” it’s not missing nor slightly off, it’s as if his neurons are mangled and unrecognizable. They exist but not in any pattern Wanda has felt before, “Off.”

Wanda turns towards Shuri and watches as the image zooms in to the location of her powers. “It’s part of what Thanos destroyed, in the frontal lobe. I-,” for the first time in the process Shuri seems uncertain of what to do next, and Wanda’s body reacts immediately, her heart racing and the hairs on her arm standing on end, unwilling to get this close just to fail again. “I didn’t have the data for it so we simply had to put something there.”

“What does this area do?”

Stark has been oddly silent during the entire thing, his fingers usually gleefully dipping into every project without asking but for this he’s simply been watching, which is why his voice causes Wanda to flinch. “Lots of things, problem solving, logic, personality, language, motor functions, sex drive,” when Wanda glares at him he gives her a half hearted shrug, “hey, that’s an important function too.”

Everything in the list seems vital to bringing Vision back as himself, which is incredible, that such a small portion could affect so much. If it was any other situation, Wanda would allow herself to be amazed at the intricacies of the human body, currently, however, she can feel a seething despair consuming her mind. “If it stays like this?”

The response is slow, evenly paced and the words are chosen very diplomatically as Shuri watches Wanda through the golden hologram. “He could be quite different.”

Wanda’s mouth settles into a serious scowl at the words, all tiredness leaving her body as she stares through the glass separating her from Vision. Bringing him back is only worth doing if she can have Vision, not some other person who happens to have his body. “I guess we need to sort this out then.”

A broad, determined toothy grin forms on Shuri’s face, “I’ve got no other plans.”  

 

 

Being in the lab means time has no meaning, the only windows lead to hallways which also aren’t connected to the outside world. It may have only been an hour since they started the process or it could have been two days, two weeks even, the only marker of passing time is Stark leaving and coming back, muttering about poopy diapers and spit up (though he smiles as he complains, fatherhood suiting him surprisingly better than anyone thought, not great, three pairs of his designer glasses already broken, but well nonetheless). Painstakingly Wanda and Shuri sort through the bundle of connections deep within Vision’s synthetic gray matter, crossing some neurons while disconnecting others and redirecting them. Eventually it feels familiar, the puzzle of Vision’s mind finally complete. Even though he hasn’t done much, it’s Stark that declares the victory, drawing a thick, black line through Wanda’s name on the list they’d compiled at the onset of their experiment, “So we get Thor now?”

Ideally they need to recreate the entire process of Vision’s original creation, but they’ve already diverged from it, among other things there was no Ultron, no Pietro, Shuri did more work than Tony, and Wanda has been far more involved in manipulating Vision’s mind. “I think,” Wanda concludes all of these novel additions means it’s fine to keep changing things, “I can do it.”

“Last I checked you’re not a thunder god.” 

Shuri rolls her eyes at Tony's asinine observation, “No shit, Sherlock.”

Wanda ignores them both, her stare never leaving Vision’s face while her fingers brush over the cradle, palms recalling the way it felt to take his life and longing to give it back to him. “I can do it, the Mindstone knows me.”

The only argument to her decision is a flailed hand from Tony, one that says  _Fine, do whatever you want._ It seems he's actually learned enough to not always verbalize his disagreements and so he steps back, pulling Shuri with him. Wanda collects her powers, pooling the scarlet from her limbs so that it congregates in her chest, from there she splits it, one half traveling down her right arm and the other her left. In her mind she can hear him whisper,  _You can never hurt me Wanda_ , and she sends the first two tendrils through the glass, hooking them around the Mindstone as an anchor for the rest of her powers.  _It’s alright_ . A low groan escapes her lips as she shoves her palms forward, scarlet streaming in thick, crackling waves into the Mindstone,  _It’s alright_ . There’s little change as she pushes herself harder, directing every ounce of power into the Mindstone, tears tumbling down her cheeks at how tired she is, not having slept in days, possibly even a week, but she can’t stop, somehow finds another reservoir of energy and pushes harder.  _I love you_ _._   Another pulse of power and there is a shift, infinitesimal and almost imperceptible but she focuses on it, sends another thread of scarlet to the active area in the stone and grimaces as she feels her knees beginning to give out, but then there is a subtle glow, the Mindstone awakening and Wanda shoves the final tide of power at Vision, thrusting the last of her strength, short circuiting the machinery and lights in the lab, and then collapses against the glass.

Her eyes crack open, the flickering lights work in tandem with her tears to discombobulate her senses. It may be a hallucination, it might even be a dream, maybe she finally fell asleep, but she thinks the patch of crimson on his forehead has spread, that it continues to spread as the Mindstone flickers like an ember. Suddenly a hand rams into the glass, causing Wanda to yell and fall back, another thud and Tony rushes to the cradle, calling out to Shuri to help him open the door. Wanda can’t see what’s happening, her view blocked by the two bodies at the cradle.

“Wanda?” This has to be a nightmare, she reasons, because that voice hasn’t existed in reality in what feels like an eon. “Where’s Wanda?”

It’s only when she hears Stark’s voice, takes in the surprise and unbridled joy of his, “Vision!” that she realizes what’s happening, that even if this is somehow a dream, it is at least not a nightmare. Her hands and feet frantically work to help her stand and it's then that she sees him, his torso and head sticking straight up out of the cradle, his movements uncharacteristically wild until his cerulean eyes lock on to her and she can count the slow whirling of his irises.

“Wanda.” The intonation of her name, the rounded _w_ and well-enunciated _d_ have been seared into her memory for so long it allows her to confirm instantly it is him, yet she still reaches for his mind, rediscovers its vibrancy and elegance, though she also feels the confusion and anxiety billowing up from the depths of his brain.

Wanda hopes to quell his nerves, “Vizh.” Saying his name is difficult, the syllables of his identity having been silent on her tongue since she yelled out to him, yet once she says it, it sloughs the weight of sorrow from her shoulders, frees her to feel a wavering, hesitant joy. “Vision!”  Her feet carry her towards him, eyes locked on his body phasing from the cradle, his uniform still singed but its color returning with each passing second, and when they meet her arms cling to his waist and his engulf her, pulling her to his chest while he kisses her head. Wanda eases her hold on him, backing up enough to tilt her head up, stare into his swirling eyes, memorizes and gets lost in the adoring smile that curves his lips up. “Vision,” she lifts onto the tips of her toes, giddy at how he responds, bending at the waist as he brings his face closer to hers, death unable to remove the deeply ingrained, automatic way their bodies move together. “Vizh.”

A tingle forms along her scalp as his fingers run through her hair, “Wanda.”

“I love you, too.” The smile on his face broadens, irises twisting faster before his eyelids close and he presses his lips to hers, and all, finally, is right with the world once more.

**Author's Note:**

> The mention of Tony and Pepper having a baby is based on rumors I've seen that the casting call for twins is for a Stark baby in Avengers 4. So I thought I'd play with that a bit. Also, I've never written Shuri before so I hope she isn't completely out of character. 
> 
> Kudos and comments are always appreciated. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed and have a wonderful day!


End file.
